The Evening Star FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 1875.

Evening Star, Issue 3849, 25 June 1875, Page 2

The Evening Star FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 1875.

The morning journals are shaking with fear at the prospect of typhoid fever, as if it was a visitation previously unknown in Dunedin; and forthwith they arrive at a common conclusion as to the remedy, and are rabid in their pressure upon the City Council to drain the City. In their opinions this is the grand panacea for all our evils, and is as certain to prevent or cure the dreaded pest as brandy and salt were to cure the cholera, or Morrison’s Pills all the complaints that “flesh is heir to.” For our own parts, although we do not undervalue drainage when safely carried out, and consider it one valuable means towards securing public health, we are inclined to think; were the City pierced with underground drains tomorrow, our contemporaries would have to seek some new reason for the existence of typhoid fever, and to devise another remedy. That there are stagnant pools in various parts of the City requiring immediate attention, either as to being filled up or drained, is true. They are calculated to engender preventible disease in their immediate locality, and, in all probability, far beyond it. The Corporation is slow, and, in some cases, we believe, powerless to deal with these; for, if we recollect rightly, they cannot compel the owners of property to remove the nuisances, nor do it for them at their expense, without their sanction; and since dwellers near them have gone to them, however desirous they may be for their abatement, they, too, are without remedy. We look upon this as a serious defect in our social rela tions, for the well-being of a community is of far more importance than the expense to which half-a-dozen men would be put if they were compelled to spend money in improving the value of their own property. Socially considered, no man has a right to do that which will inconvenience or endanger the health or life of another. We fear this sound social principle is overlooked or ignored in many ways tending to engender or foster disease, for which City drainage would prove a very inadequate remedy. The agitation is nothing new. Years ago City drainage was examined into, and pronounced by men of science to be an expensive and risky experiment, which, unless very judiciously carried out, might produce worse effects than the present system. The fact is that the drainage of the City would be of little use without a complete change in manv of the arrangements of household property. Years ago the closet and cesspool system was denounced as being fraught with danger to public health. It was shown that the practice of forming pits that allowed the saturation of earth with foetid gases, tended j to the pollution of streams and of the air ; and attempts were made to intro- | duce more cleanly and better plans. But ! they failed ; the cesspool system'

still continues, intensified in danger through the crowding 'of dwellinghouses, consequent upon increase of population. We have no doubt that Chy drainage well carried out would do much, but compelling cesspools to be lined so as to prevent absorption by the soil, and so constructed that their foetid contents can be rendered innocuous by having earth or ashes thrown upon them and removed at short periods, v r °uld be far more effectual than underground drainage. Sometliing might be effected by that, but it is in the .power of the people to do much more for themselves, both in the external and internal economy of their dwellings. A corporation may be a good public purifier, but the true change required is in our domestic habits. Ibis done, the doubtful experiment of City drainage may be safely left until we can more clearly see a safe method.